South Africa Trip April 2009 - Mamokaile School

Our visit to Mamokaile school took place on day 3 in Kodumela and started with another wonderful welcome with some of the children singing the songs from the CD we left with them in 2007 and Children in Grade 5 and 6 dancing, modern and traditional dancing respectively.

It was great to see Rosina the headteacher again and she mentioned very warmly the link with Cholsey School several times. Rosina then showed us the improvements to the school.

At last Mamokaile school has a water supply – the water is collected through pipes from the foot of the Drakensburg mountains (roughly the length of a football pitch away from the school grounds) They now have a vegetable garden and flower beds.

She was very proud of their new vegetable garden. Also they now cook school meals on site using the vegetables they grow.
Another improvement is government-funded tables and chairs (unfortunately they are the wrong size, equivalent size of year 5 / 6 but for year 2!)

Then we paid a visit to the classroom destroyed by the falling water tank. Unfortunately there seems to be no insurance for the school or comback from the workman who installed the tank, so Mamokaile School are awaiting the government’s decision on when or if the classroom will be repaired.

At this point most of the visiting group left to visit the Lafata Women's Enterprise Project (bead ladies), while the Cholsey school representative spent further, in-depth time at the school.

Once the cars had gone and children dismissed for home (school finishes at 1pm), there was time to talk to Rosina about her school and tell her more about Cholsey School. We visited the grade 1 and grade 2 classrooms and looked at their plans and displays. They are very concerned about teaching correctly where English is concerned and getting it right for their children.
We agreed that Cholsey could send her some of their teaching plans to show the Mamokaile teachers that they are doing a good job. The Mamokaile curriculum and topics are slightly different but they use long term, medium term and weekly plans as we do at Cholsey School. They have many changes from government without the resources to teach with of course as they do not have the money to buy them.

Rosina and Val (from Cholsey) then looked at the teaching materials we had prepared in Cholsey so that her teachers could use the lessons after we had gone.

We had prepared a number of laminated photographs of Cholsey, with both English and Northern Sotho descriptions to aidin English lessons.  These were very popular and we read most of the sentences talking about how best to use them. The hope is they will be used across the school as the sentences are graded from easy for Grade R, 1 and 2 to medium for grade 3 and 4 and complex for Grades 5 to 7.  Rosina particularly liked the photograph of Red Cow cottage because it had a thatched roof. It was great to be able to show them so much of Cholsey using the photographs – thanks to Estelle Browne for taking them all for us.

We talked about the challenges faced by Mamokaile School and Cholsey School, including the lack of funding to teach as we would both like and the struggle with government to get enough classrooms – Mamokaile school has 5 temporary classrooms and find like Cholsey they are very cold in winter and too warm in summer. Their wish is to have at least one more permanent building built.

It is likely that another temporary classroom will be put on the site while investigations continue over the damaged classroom, there seems to be no idea of how long this will take. Unfortunately it was used both as a classroom and storeroom for the food for school meals as well as the area in which the meals were cooked, a double blow. The staff are philosophical, even though they have lost an entire classroom with all its books, learning materials and displays and have no idea when they will have it back in use.

Fortunately an above grounds storage tank had also been fitted in the schoolyard. It is amazing that the tower that fell was built so close to the classroom and on such flimsy foundations. On looking at the small blocks of concrete which had lifted out of the ground on such sandy soil we concluded that is was shoddy workmanship not really good enough for a school.
A blessing of course is the accident happened at night after torrential rain and not during the school day when up to 55 children could have been in the room.

We also found out why phonics is so difficult as Val was asked to recite that alphabet phonetically, fortunately she managed and it was a picture to hear 10 South African teachers trying to recite the alphabet back! There are certain sounds, which are very hard for them to make. We then moved on the some of the vowel digraphs and beginning and end blends!  Some of the teachers were clearly frustrated the sounds were so difficult for them but I said it would be just as hard for British teachers to recite the alphabet in Sotho. Any tension was relieved by Val's efforts to say the 7 words she could remember in Northern Sotho resulting in gales of laughter all around.